The Element of Crime
(Forbrydelsens element)

Screening on Film

Directed by Lars von Trier.
With Michael Elphick, Esmond Knight, Me Me Lai.
Denmark, 1984, 35mm, color, 104 min.
Danish with English subtitles.

Lars von Trier’s debut feature is an hallucinatory and stylish masterpiece. Long enjoying cult-movie status in Europe, The Element of Crime is the story of Fischer, an ex-cop who returns to his old beat somewhere in Northern Europe after a thirteen-year hiatus in Cairo in order to help solve the sinister “lotto murders.” Under the baleful gaze of his mentor, author of the treatise “The Element of Crime,” Fischer employs his teacher’s method of trying to enter the criminal’s mind. As much a cinematic allegory as a psychological thriller, the film investigates the terrain of criminal cinemas past, radically revising genre conventions even as it opens onto a new mode of postmodern practice.